This Entrepreneur Article Resonates

Some great quotes and lines in this piece:

creativity happens when the constraints get applied

Don't use the word failure. Instead, you should call it “the successful discovery of something that did not work." This will lead to something that does work and figuring out how to fix issues in a time of panic.


Chaos and failure are powerful tools that forced entrepreneurs can keep in their tool belt. They teach us how to pivot and adapt—and those are essential skills for any entrepreneur,

https://qz.com/work/2063563/what-forced-entrepreneurs-teach-us-about-succeeding-in-business

It should be noted here that forced entrepreneurs face a lot of pressure. There’s no plan B, no option to quit; they need their business to succeed. If there was ever a recipe for anxiety, that sounds like it.

When you have no choice but to survive, you get really resourceful.

A friend of mine often says, “creativity happens when the constraints get applied.” To really feel these constraints, you have to act like an owner.

Burn the boats? So what does that mean. It's adapt or die. If you don't survive on your mission you can't go back on the boat and head home because it doesn't exist.


“burn the boats”? The story goes that during the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519, Spanish commander Hernán Cortés deliberately destroyed his own ships so that his men would have only two options: conquer or die."



Pivot & Adapt to succeed.

Google Noto - No Tofu

An amazing project from Google named Noto. The name Noto stands for No Tofu and is named as such because of those little boxes you are used to seeing on foreign language websites because your browsers can't decipher what it is.

So now after 5 years of hard work Google has launched Noto. In the video the engineers discuss the
scope of a project so big that you have to let the whole process play itself out knowing that it won't be done tomorrow or next year but years from now. A long term play to make a difference similar to Jamie Dimons vision on building sustainable banking systems in Africa that I blogged about and similar to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative to solve all current diseases in our childrens lifetime.

Languages that they had to ask for help with from internal staff was Malayalam and Telugu and Cherokee was a language that they could not find in house experts to help review the fonts for so they had to find friends of friends to solve the issues.

The idea was to have a unified set of scripts and then multiple weights (3300 characters per weight and then it grew geometrically from there). This project was a huge investment of time and was open source for all products that want to use these fonts. Currently the Sans Serif family is just now about done and the quality and design is something that was always kept in mind during the project. Nobody else has done this before with over 100 writing systems and more than 100 languages in place.

For more information check out #googlenoto or watch this Vimeo video: https://vimeo.com/185700918